A German opposition lawmaker has been criticized for suggesting on Sunday that authorities could subsidize paid sex for patients requiring nursing care.
The Green Party’s spokeswoman on care policy, Elisabeth Scharfenberg, told Welt am Sonntag newspaper that she could imagine authorities “financing sexual assistance.”
Prostitution has been legal in Germany since 2002 and the newspaper also wrote that Scharfenberg’s suggestion has its roots in a system based in the Netherlands, where applicants have to prove a medical need and show that they are otherwise unable to pay for a sex worker themselves.
Governing Social Democrats lawmaker Karl Lauterbach told Bild daily on Monday that the country did not “need paid prostitution in homes for the elderly, and certainly not on prescription,” Associated Press reports.
- Inside Mississippi's Last Abortion Clinic—and the Biggest Fight for Abortion Rights in a Generation
- Do Current COVID-19 Tests Still Detect Omicron?
- The First U.S. Offshore Wind Farm Could Be a Lifeline for Struggling New England Cities
- Welcome to TV's Era of Peak Redundancy
- The Key Role a Local Newspaper Played in the Trial Over Ahmaud Arbery's Murder
- TIME's Top 100 Photos of 2021
- 2021: The Year the Grift Kept Giving
